With a little over two months to go for CAT 2008, the pressure on B-school aspirants is mounting. Strategising, mock CATs, time management -- each have their own importance and value when it comes to making your CAT attempt meaningful.

To help test-takers, we asked students who have taken the CAT to share their tips and tricks. Here, Nilangshu Nandi, a student at IIM Lucknow, shares his experiences.

My strategy was based on two things: preparation and performance.

PREPARATION

DI and quant needs huge practice from the CAT material available in the market. Without practice, speed won't come.

Few tips to prepare for DI / Quant:

• Analyse the questions and check as to which type of problem is taking how much time of yours to solve. Eg permutation combinations, geometry, time-speed-work, ratio proportion, mathematics based DI questions, strategy based DI question, etc
• This will help you know which part of a section to improve and the knowledge will be handy in selecting to attempt an unattempted during the last 10 minutes of the exam
• You can do this analysis by solving the sub sections from the preparatory materials and checking your time
• Recheck your timings in the mock CATs

For verbals, you need to have your basics strong. Get your grammar correct. Read a lot of books and newspapers.

Tips for Verbals:

• Practice a lot on grammar
• Time your RC preparation. See how long you take to read a passage.
• Since it is best to read the passage only once and answer all questions, it is better to time every passage you read from newspapers and/ or books
• Just check how long you are taking to read a 1000-word passage from a newspaper and then jotting all the important points. Initially it will take you 15-20 mins. But with practice it will come down to less than 10 mins.
• There are different types of passage that come in CAT. The philosophical or gyaan-based RCs take more time as they do not have much direct questions. On the other hand the factual ones are easier to crack.
• Recheck your timing of RC and concept on grammar in the mock CATs
• I reiterate -- get your basic grammar correct.

PERFORMANCE

The two most important things to be kept in mind to crack CAT are to:

• Score well enough to clear cut offs in all sections
• Score really well in at least one section to get a good overall percentile

The total time given was 150 minutes. My time division was as follows:

• 45 minutes per section
• Verbals first because the grammar section is normally easy to score fast. 15-18 mins for grammar and 25-27 mins for RC. 8-9 mins per passage.
• Then Quant, because it was my strongest point. 2.5-3 mins per question.
• Then DI
• At the end I had kept 15 minutes to return to Quant and / or DI, whichever section would not have gone well for me

So what I faced during the exam was:

• Verbals grammar finished in 10 mins. I attempted almost all.
• RC was tough. I attempted 1-2 questions per RC (only the direct questions)
• I finished off verbals section in 30 minutes and had attempted 17 questions
• Then I attempted quant. The problems were time-taking ones. Hence I could finish only 13 questions in the allotted 45 mins.
• I took up DI and finished 14 questions in those 45 mins.
• I ended up having 30 mins in my hand to go back to verbals / DI / quant
• As quant is my strong section, I gave 20 mins to it and did 7 more questions
• And the last 10 mins I did DI, where I solved one more set of four questions

This strategy helped me clock the following percentiles:

• Verbal: 95%
• DI: 96%
• Quant: 99.98%
• Overall: 99.89%

Have you aced the CAT? Do you have tips that could help students improve their scores or stress-busting strategies to beat pre-CAT nerves? Send in your advice to getahead@rediff.co.in and we'll publish your strategies right here on rediff.com.

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